paul flannery

Are The Celtics Back?

When a beatdown the likes of which the Celtics laid on the Suns takes place, it leaves a man with three options. He can:

1. Contemplate a world in which the Celtics mascot dunks from a trampoline on a late-night talk show (and gets booed) and wonder, really, what Red would have thought if he saw the Celtics dancers, Lucky, and/or Gino at the Garden today.

Realization: It doesn’t really matter.

2. Look for friends on Facebook, and by friends I mean people you once casually knew on some level and will now have to decide if you knew them/they knew you well enough to be so bold as to ask if you actually can be friends with them, even though your odds of seeing them are roughly equal to the likelihood of Steve Nash trying to stay in front of Rajon Rondo for any extended period of time.

Realization: Facebook is like high school, but even more fake and stressful, and without the benefit of chicken burgers once a week.

3. Spend way too much time trying to come up with complicated answers to relatively easy questions like: Are the Celtics back?

Realization: Yes.

“You know, I said it about four or five games ago,” Doc Rivers said Monday night. “I just like where we’re going right now as a team. We’re starting to make plays for each other and everything’s about each other.

Doc then referenced a play when Ray Allen made a cut to the basket that was so good it gave somebody else an open shot, Brian Scalabrine in this case.

“We felt like we have been playing better,” Paul Pierce said. “Not taking anything away from New Jersey and Toronto, (but) they’re not as good as Phoenix. So this is more of a test for us to maintain that consistency, especially with a big road trip coming up in Miami and Orlando.” (Which we will get to in due course).

The question, the only question that really matters right now for the Celtics is, are they back to playing the kind of ball they laid on the rest of the League for a month and a half?

And though it would be unusually rash for someone who believes so heavily in numbers and averages to try to make a case on a sample period the size of five games--and really only four and change since they were dreadful in the fourth quarter against Toronto and relatively uninspired in the first two and a half against the Raptors in the rematch—but I will do so here. (Which is not to say that the Celtics will walk into the Bermuda Triangle that is Miami and Orlando and get a sweep. Ask the Lakers about that one).

For starters, the run is a little longer than five games. Rivers felt like it actually began against Houston, which was the loss at home in between the weird one at Charlotte and the bad one at Cleveland, where people began to get a little concerned. “Now the Celtics are losing at home, too,” is how the lead ran on the AP story, which summed up a lot of feelings at the time.

But Rivers saw good things. He saw better defense for one thing. He saw better ball movement (20 assists against 11 turnovers), but mostly he saw a lot of loose balls bounce against the Celtics. Doc is smart enough to know that loose balls are sometimes nothing more than luck, be it good or bad, and he was confident in that assessment of the Celtics’ effort even after a well-traveled shooter named Von Wafer knocked down what might have been the biggest shot of his career right in front of the Boston bench with Eddie, Sam and Baby yelling sweet nothings in his ear. Hey, it happens.

“I don’t think this is a team that gets shaken or rattled when we go through a struggle,” Pierce said. “We saw when we struggle, we stay together and we keep our heads up. I never really thought we lost our confidence. It was just a matter of going back and doing the things we do well. It’s remembering who we are as a team.”

There’s an easy and honest explanation for the Celtics struggles when they lost four in a row and seven of nine, and it’s so easy and honest that no one wants to give it to them, but here it is: They were tired. Now the Celtics are the defending champs and the defending champs aren’t supposed to get tired, or at least they aren’t supposed to use it as an excuse, but there it is.

The Celtics flew cross country and played four games in six days, flew back home and played one game at home (a win), went back on the road for two losses, returned home for one game (again) for the second game of a back-to-back and then went back on the road to play the best team in the league 48 hours later. All in the span of two weeks and one day. So yeah, they were a little spent.

But what’s ironic is that the real flip of the switch didn’t come until the second half of a the second game of a back-to-back in which they had been outscored 87-64 by the Raptors over the fourth quarter of the first game and the first half of the second and should have been zombie tired.

Why did it turn then? I’m not sure anyone really knows other than the Celtics were obviously tired of getting their asses kicked and Pierce went off into his y’all can’t stop me so don’t even try mode at exactly the right time.

Since then the Celtics have racked up convincing wins over New Jersey twice (eh) and Phoenix once (whoa). The second one against Jersey (at Jersey, mind you) was so complete and thorough that Net coach Lawrence Frank benched his starters and basically accused them of throwing in the towel. So, what’s happening? A couple of things.

First: Brian Scalabrine is no Kendrick Perkins and the Celtics will be glad when Perk is back to bang around with the likes of Dwight Howard, but Scal is spacing the floor in such a way that the Celtics are basically playing a lot of five out (that is, five out on the perimeter).

Second: The bench has been back on the upswing. During the five-game winning streak the Celtics have outscored their opponents in the second quarter in four of them and by a total of 29 points. That’s on top of being +44 in the first quarter in those games. One of their issues has been jumping out to a nice lead in the first, watching it evaporate in the second and then having to play through it. That’s draining.

It’s also cyclical. The bench owned the first 10 games of the season, was passable in the middle 20, a problem in the next 10, and is now stabilizing again. Why? Because it’s a bench, and if Hubie Brown has taught us nothing (and of course he has) it’s that your numbers 5-through-8 will never be as consistent as your numbers 1-through-4, especially on the road. That’s why they’re your 5-through-8 and not your 1-through-4.

Which gets us back to the whole tired thing and the upcoming trip to Florida. The Celtics have had more times between games (and they have not lost once when playing on two days rest or more) and with the bench playing better the starters are obviously fresher.

So, it will all be very interesting if the Celtics can open the mini trip with a win against Miami on two days rest, and it will be even more interesting the next night against the Magic, about whom the Celtics swear up and down is playing the best ball in the league right now. But that game isn’t a referendum because the question has already been answered.

Yes, the Celtics are back to being one of the best teams in the league, with a nasty defense, an unselfish efficient offense and a sometimes flighty bench that is playing better right now. Just like they were before they went out to LA for the holidays.

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